The Covid-19 pandemic exposed me to the absurd. Not that I was naive to it, but it couldn’t have coalesced more for me than one morning in a Tesco café surrounded by masked faces and robots outside (I was in Milton Keynes).
Sartre wrote about how everything is always normal in cafes.
During the coronavirus pandemic, between the first and second lockdowns, I found myself in a Tesco café, with the book Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Usually a setting where, to me, everything would be reassuringly normal, but it wasn’t. Everyone was wearing masks, everyone was distanced, the cashier was taking all the restrictions and order of things very seriously.
Cafes are all about coffee and breakfast. It just so happened that the pandemic had infiltrated everything.
I’d picked up Nausea that morning and sat down to read it with a latte. Reading that line about cafes increased the feeling of being on another plane somehow. This book was talking to me, threatening my safe place.
During lockdown I imagined that pigeons must have experienced a sense of confusion just as we did. My cafes have been taken over by masks and hand sanitisers and who-are-you-where-have-you-been-and-whom-with monitoring via mobile phones. Nothing new there perhaps, but explicit, and we’re all complicit now, and necessarily so. The virus is invisible, so we make ourselves more visible while we keep away from each other and disappear behind face masks. All while the robots continue to deliver food to MK.
The pigeons must have been struck by the absence of bustle and people and crumbs. People no longer had the distraction of shops, and pigeons no longer had the distraction of crumbs. I imagined pigeons with Nausea.
While in the café and reading the book I had to keep looking up from the reading and taking a deep breath as the Nausea grew. I found myself looking around more at the other customers rather than reading the book, wondering if they were having the same reaction as me., wondering if I stared at them harder I could refocus on where they were and now where the Nausea was.
The cashier was taking all Covid-safe measures so seriously I found myself annoyed. Does she think she can beat this? Yet what else is she to do. This set-up is absurd yet it’s all we’ve got, and we will carry on inexorably towards our coffees and breakfasts.
Nausea is expanding chaos brought together with the flimsy strings of face masks. It’s the increased digital presence and the roaming of robots while we disappear. This is what I experienced while reading Nausea, in the place where, for Sartre, it’s supposed to be kept at bay. The normality of the café continuing underneath it all, a feeling like it shouldn’t be continuing, for goodness’ sake why not stop for a while? It’s Camus’ absurdity – that we continue going to cafes while there is a pandemic going on!
I re-focused on the procedures within the café, I drank my coffee and read. That’s all I could do.
